Work-life Balance and its Impact on Culture: Confessions of a Reformed Workaholic

The hundreds of employee engagement surveys that we conduct every year is showing an interesting, albeit concerning trend:highly engaged organizations often have emerging employee issues and concerns around decreasing work-life balance. On the one hand, this is a form of “collateral damage”.Highly engaged employees, by definition, tend to give more of themselves, and sometimes work-life balance suffers as a result – through the employee’s own engaged behaviours. Because work-life balance has little influence on engagement per se, it (too) often gets lower priority:however, this approach is fraught with danger. Highly engaged and high performing organizations can fall into the work-life balance “cultural trap”.